Capone

...His cocaine addiction made the thought of imminent death easy to accept: under the influence of the drug it seemed as if la mala vita amounted to a glorious suicide mission...

...Linowitz was one of the lucky few...

...a criminal empire that made scores of millions a year in the 1920s, but became something of a philanthropist and social philosopher...

...He financed soup kitchens and threw money from his limo to the omnipresent poor...

...Easily exploited by members of their own group (called "padrones"), some two-thirds of Italians lived in a state of "semislavery," according to the Bulletin of the Department of Labor...

...No mere theorist on the matter, Capone long refused to pay them, for which he was sentenced at age 33 to eleven years in prison...

...During his glory years Capone was 5'7" and fairly fat, and had a brother who was a bodyguard for Calvin Coolidge...

...According to a popular theory of the day, Southern Italians had no mind for mathematics or any mechanical aptitude...

...Sexual hypocrisy came naturally to him: he married a proper dowager, who lent him an aura of Victorian respectability even as he kept an attractive Jewish mistress...

...He eventually was shipped to a new prison called Alcatraz, where he became known as the "Wop with the Mop" and all but disintegrated as his syphilis moved in for the kill...

...What better time to dream of controlling not just Cicero but the rackets of the entire city of Chicago...

...You're holding 'em up...

...None of this random killing stuff...

...Capone had other ideas and hitched up with local gangster Frankie Yale, starting out as a waiter and dishwasher at Yale's Harvard Inn, where a knife-wielding patron provided him with the facial scars that are nearly as famous as the Mona Lisa's smile...

...ing 25,000 men and he predicts freely he'll soon be employing 75,000...

...Individual clients stayed with the same lawyer, corporate clients stayed with the same firm, and the young lawyers hired to work in a firm became partners there...

...Until at least the end of the Second World War, a lawyer represented clients rather than causes...

...t is clear early on that our author is strongly sympathetic to his subject: Even before we see Capone shed any blood, we are told that he's really not to blame...

...Capone did not leave intact...

...Since that time, Capone has been thought of as a monomaniacal monster, an image that Bergreen succeeds in softening...

...During one campaign, he was forced to admit he had frequented Chicago brothels...

...Yes, it's bootleg while it's on the trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker rooms or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a silver salver, it's hospitality...

...As he said more than once: "Public service is my motto...

...Capone would have none of it: "Don't do any reporting...

...All I've ever done is supply a public demand...

...F 4 yen during his prison years, however, he maintained high standards, subscribing to eighty-seven periodicals, including Harper's Monthly and the American Mercury, which ran a story entitled "America's Torture Chamber" about Alcatraz...

...They see the law as a tool for social change—and real power...

...All in all, it's enough to make you wish for a better class of criminals—ones who might model themselves after Al Capone, whose tale is freshly told by Laurence Bergreen, an accomplished biographer whose previous subject was Irving Berlin...

...Bergreen takes even more delight in telling us that Eliot Ness, who wrongly held himself up as the man who whipped Capone, was a self-promoting drunk who dropped dead, aged 54, after pouring himself a scotch and soda...

...During those early years he also developed a head for numbers, got married, and probably contracted the syphilis that would lame him a few decades hence...

...Many were comfortably upper middle class...

...And why stop at Chicago...

...By the time of his release, Capone was given to drooling and extended flights of fancy...

...Why not the entire country...

...Besides the ill-effects of prejudice and a rough childhood, there was his disease, which Bergreen insists played an increasing role in shaping his subject's personality...

...The guard threatened to do violence to his tormentor, and was in turn threatened by his supervisor with being put on report...

...If "Capone's syphilis had healed itself," he writes, "as most cases did, it is unlikely he would have develCAPONE: THE MAN AND THE ERA Laurence Bergreen Simon & Schuster/701 pages/$30 reviewed by DAVE SHIFLETT time to time, including the antics of the Black Hand, a group of Italian extortionists who terrorized residents by kidnapping and murdering neighborhood children...

...70 The American Spectator November 1994 oped into the high-profile, feared gangster he became...

...When caught, they glower at their victims' survivors and blame society for their crimes...

...Capone, you are the greatest man in the world...

...Take that for what you will: our author ascribes nearly every foul mood either to syphilis or to Capone's other demon: cocaine...

...Our totally fulJerome M. Marcus is a lawyer living in Philadelphia...

...He also indicates that if crime was in Capone's genes, his particular talents were not passed on...

...You can't cure a thirst by law...

...Young Alphonse adapted fairly well, and at an early age began showing the personal dynamism for which he would become famous...

...I'll take care of him...

...Get in step...

...Blackmun is beloved of the ABA for his willingness to use constitutional litigation to advance the country "down the road toward the full emancipation of women" (as he explained the goal of his opinion in Roe)—and toward improving conditions for the "little people," as Justice Blackmun's law clerks say he describes the objects of his solicitude...

...Richman, I pray to God he come in here and pee every twenty minutes...

...Among young lawyers this view of law practice is predominant...

...One day, while scuffling around outside the Brooklyn docks, he ridiculed a clumsy guard: "Hey, you long-legged number three there...

...Valentine's Day Massacre, a kind of gangland-style hostile takeover...

...Mencken, who met Capone while the latter was being treated at Johns Hopkins, noted that Capone's altruistic bent was still in working order: "He believes that he is the owner of a factory somewhere in Florida employM y copy of the most recent American Bar Association Journal has arrived...

...T he Capone family came to America from Naples in 1894 and set up camp in Brooklyn, where pa worked as a barber while ma produced and raised children, including Alphonse, born in January 1899...

...El filled first couple are the embodiment of this ideal...

...Consider the antics of Big Bill Thompson, a Chicago politician and Capone ally...

...In his zeal to rehabilitate Capone, Bergreen is rough on Capone's tormentors...

...The attendant, picking them up, kept saying, "Yes, suh, Mr...

...In a later day, this man could have ruled all of Arkansas...

...He was also a friend of the working class, as illustrated by this restroom encounter, as later recalled by an acquaintance: While he stood at the urinal he kept strewing twenty-dollar bills on the floor...

...During the Dever administration, for instance, Thompson built himself a $25,000 yacht, christened her the Big Bill, arranged a figurehead depicting none other than the ship's owner, and, to the vast amusement of the press, declared his intention to lead an expedition to capture a certain fish reputed to climb trees...

...Bergreen is particularly good on the subject of Chicago's vibrant and almost gleefully corrupt political life...

...He does convince us, however, that Capone had a lot more class than the disciples of Snoop Doggy Dogg will ever muster, along with high principles...

...It was not always thus, as Sol Linowitz reminds us...

...Death came at his Florida estate on January 25, 1947...

...He later changed his name, which is where the Capone story ends...

...In 1919 he killed his first man during a dicerelated incident, and two years later headed for Chicago, where he became a multi-millionaire, thanks to the collision between America's taste for beer and the Volstead Act...

...in the margins fairly regularly, but Bergreen's book is too full of life to be too damaged by these excesses...

...After Capone washed his hands and departed, the attendant confided, "Mr...

...Like most good Republicans (Capone was a strong supporter of the local party), he was not happy with the notion of income taxes...

...But Thompson, who became mayor of Chicago, was no match for Capone, who not only oversaw The American Spectator November 1994 71 The impression Bergreen hopes to leave us with is that of a cherub in the rough...

...Schools were places to fight, and the Irish kids performed sidewalk tooth removal with great glee...

...At a press conference, Capone explained the reasons behind his success: "They call Al Capone a bootlegger...

...Bergreen infers that Al was addicted to the drug from a medical report mentioning Capone's burned-through septum, and in the spirit of biographers who rush to judgment on the basis of facts not fully established, he offers us these choice passages: Every time he snorted cocaine, he experienced its distinctive, exhilarating rush of self-confidence approaching omnipotence, and the manic restlessness it induced...

...Society, we are told many times, was full of hypocrisy, whether in its pursuit of teetotalism or other attempts at purification...

...He was ten years old at the time...

...He nursed a very small client (the Haloid Corporation) into a very large one THE BETRAYED PROFESSION: LAWYERING AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Sol Linowitz, with Martin Mayer Charles Scribner's Sons / 273 pages / $25 reviewed by JEROME M. MARCUS 72 The American Spectator November 1994...

...Bergreen includes a report on Capone's medical state at age 39, as noted by a prison official: "He still has disturbances of consciousness at times as his mind wanders and he hears God and the Angels verbally reply to prayers etc...

...Capone, at least in Bergreen's telling, didn't even like violence, believing for the most part that gun play was bad for business (though he would approve the St...

...Worse yet, these malevolent punks sometimes shoot perfect strangers from ambush to prove their pluck and frequently rob productive citizens, sometimes murdering them in the bargain...

...another critic wrote that "their emotional instability stands out in sharpest contrast to the self-control of the Hebrew and the stolidity of the Slay...

...As for murder, there was plenty of it in his line of work, but the killers trained their fire on rivals or former allies gone sour...

...His goal was to keep the client out of trouble and to help the client accomplish what he wanted so long as it was legal...

...His departure was not an unreasonable step, for there' was little to be gained from attending a New York public school even then, according to Bergreen, who tells us that a general anti, Italian prejudice all but insured failure...

...The most accomplished took a leave to go into state or city government, or to Washington, but they came back when they were through and they retired from the firm where they had begun...

...In August 1965, Capone's only child, Sonny, was arrested for shoplifting $3.50 worth of merchandise in the Kwik Chek supermarket in North Miami Beach...

...only a lucky few at the top of the totem pole became genuinely rich...

...The author sneers at a popular anti-vice tract that included a map locating Chicago's whorehouses: "With a copy of If Christ Came to Chicago...

...A reviewer finds himself writing "How does he know...

...The family started out in an apartment with no furniture in a neighborhood ideally positioned to catch the full stench of the Gowanus Canal, which was regularly bobbing with corpses, often fairly ripe ones...

...Their use of 9mm pistols lends them a serious air, though most spend far too little time at the shooting range, a shortcoming apparent during a favorite activity: the mobile gun battle, in which the gangsters chase each other through the streets in Jeeps and BMWs, firing wildly as they go, knocking out untold windows, killing cats and dogs, and, occasionally, maiming innocent people as they sit in easy chairs positioned perilously close to windows...

...Harry Blackmun, just retired from the Supreme Court after twenty years spent defending his baby—Roe v. Wade—and its progeny, graces the Journal's cover...

...Personal bonds tied lawyer and client together more or less permanently...

...Ask the nation's law students why they're on their way to the bar, and most will reveal that they are driven by the image of Thurgood Marshall arguing for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, or some such simulacrum of crusading...

...Flamboyance was his trademark...

...in hand, a tourist could find his way to a brothel and later return to the book to understand how terrible the experience had been...

...BOOK REVIEWS ost Americans M will agree that our contemporary gangsters are a shabby Iota herd of sociopathic, murderous, illiterate adolescents who can't put their ballcaps on straight or keep the crotches of their pants from hanging about their knees...

...He ate and drank with abandon...

...Capone stayed in school until the age of 14 (having barely slipped into seventh grade), departing after a fight with a teacher and a subsequent beating by the principal...

...The lawyer sought not to move the law but to move the client through the law as smoothly as possible...

...Just let the big sonofabitch outside the gate...

...Scandal pursued him wherever he went," Bergreen writes...

...Other hazards popped up from Dave Shiflett is deputy editorial page editor at the Rocky Mountain News and The American Spectator's Rocky Mountain Editor...